tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7961882.post2056967463191944943..comments2019-05-25T09:05:29.727+00:00Comments on Open and Shut?: When email marketing campaigns go awry: Q&A with Austin Jelcick of Cyagen BiosciencesOpen &amp; Shuthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05433823131339077354noreply@blogger.comBlogger7125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7961882.post-78504923768336849542015-08-18T15:02:00.137+00:002015-08-18T15:02:00.137+00:00Cyagen have have made a change to their program: t...Cyagen have have made a change to their program: they are no longer associating the promotion with the impact factor but basing it strictly on a per article basis. See <a href="http://www.cyagen.com/us/en/community/promotions/citation-reward-program.html" rel="nofollow">here</a>.<br /><br />Will this satisfy the critics?Richard Poynderhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05433823131339077354noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7961882.post-91360352039810360902015-08-17T11:23:29.706+00:002015-08-17T11:23:29.706+00:00Error Variance
Mr. Gunn, I think we can agree tha...<b>Error Variance</b><br /><br />Mr. Gunn, I think we can agree that Point 1 could only be settled by evidence: One could take, say, 10 articles from 100 journals at publication time T, and rank them by the impact factors of their journals. Then, at Time T + 2 years, rank them again by their accrued citation counts. Would there be a significant positive correlation between the two rankings or not? That would not depend only on the normal distribution of citations within and between journals. It would also depend on the correlation between journal impact factor and journal quality (as ranked by submission/rejection rates or by peer quality ratings). The latter correlation may not be high, but I bet it would be positive and significant too. Where I expect distribution would play a role is among the journal impact factors rather than just the article citation counts: The correlation between impact factor and quality may differ in different impact factor bands. And of course this would all have to be done within fields, not across them. -- But I don&#39;t deny that the correlations, even if significant, would be small, and the error variance huge. Hence the predictive power of impact factors would be small.<br /><br />About Point 3 I would have to say that the issue is far, far deeper and more complicated than something that can be resolved with the statement &quot;Animal models save lives.&quot; That correlation, like the putative correlation between journal impact factor and quality, can lie anywhere between 0% and 100%, and what is at stake in the error variance is animal lives and suffering, not useless articles, useless journals or useless quality rankings.Stevan Harnadhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14374474060972737847noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7961882.post-21952061731176165302015-08-17T09:56:27.585+00:002015-08-17T09:56:27.585+00:00&quot;Animal models save lives&quot; may or may no...&quot;Animal models save lives&quot; may or may not be true, but Mr Gunn completely misses Dr Harnad&#39;s point, which is ethical. Even if Mr Gunn&#39;s assertion is correct, it does not change the fact that animals are being treated as less important than humans, and are suffering and being manipulated to help humans - which is Dr Harnad&#39;s point. Charles Oppenheimhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07331364306852037767noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7961882.post-27550650140007268522015-08-17T06:54:32.010+00:002015-08-17T06:54:32.010+00:00Thanks for this follow-up, Ricky. I think where th...Thanks for this follow-up, Ricky. I think where the messed up was tying the promotion to the Impact Factor. It&#39;s common for companies to want to know how often they&#39;re being mentioned in the literature, and lacking the ability to text-mine all publications, most companies have to depend on authors reporting those mentions to them. A financial incentive, which works like a reminder, to let company X know you&#39;ve mentioned them in a paper is just one way to get authors to report to them the usage. I don&#39;t find that bit objectionable. It also suggests that one potential market for altmetrics is companies that want to know about the &quot;impact&quot; their services have had.<br /><br />Just to briefly respond to Dr. Harnad, he&#39;s demonstrably wrong about point 1, and arguably misled about point 3. (I guess I&#39;ve said what I think about point 2 above).<br />Regarding point 1: The Impact Factor is of no predictive value regarding an individual article in an issue of a journal. The reason for this is that citations are distributed among articles in an issue in a pseudo-logarithmic fashion. It&#39;s not at all true that the average number of citations per article in an issue of a high impact journal is higher than the average citations per article in a issue of a journal with a lower impact factor. More to the point, citations/article isn&#39;t the proper metric to use for the distribution of citations per article. Average citations per article would only be appropriate to use if the citations each article received were normally distributed, which they most certainly are not. What Cyagen should have done, if they were to do anything at all, is to use an article-specific metric. Since they can&#39;t use number of citations, because they take too long to accumulate, they could have use the number of downloads of the article, the number of Mendeley readers of the article (which correlates reasonably well with future citations - disclosure: I work for Mendeley) or the altmetric.com score or, you know, ANYTHING other than the impact factor.<br /><br />Regarding point 3: Animal models save lives.<br /><br />I am aware that all of the above could use citations in various places, but please forgive this oversight. I am writing this around midnight on Sunday after a 10 mile trail run and a few drinks. The alternative would not be writing it at all. Please inquire if you need further information.@mrgunnhttp://synthesis.williamgunn.org/noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7961882.post-83709213321901291512015-08-16T21:45:40.117+00:002015-08-16T21:45:40.117+00:00Mode of Predation
Three points:
1. What you are ...<b>Mode of Predation</b><br /><br />Three points:<br /><br />1. What you are saying about the impact factor being phased out is not quite correct. The journal impact factor is the average citation count of the articles in the journal. Citation counts themselves are of course not being phased out. It is relevant and important for many reasons how much an article (or an author) has been cited — or is likely to be cited. The average citation count (impact factor) of the journal in which an article is published is of course much less informative than the citation count of the article itself, but its predictive value is not zero either. If something important depended on sorting in advance the articles that are likely to have high, medium or low citation counts in two years’ time, the average citation count of the journal (together with the average citation account of the author) are the best predictors when it’s still too early to count the article’s eventual citations. Only an expert who could read, compare and sort all the articles could do better.<br /><br />2. That said, what this offshore “animal model” vendor is doing with these financial incentives to flog his wares in journals — the higher-impact the journal, the better — is obviously revolting and ought to be illegal, or at least named and shamed, as you are doing. I can hardly understand why it is being treated as if there were any ambiguity whatsoever on this count. (And the fact that they want to give a bigger reward for being advertised in a high-impact journal is just evidence — if evidence was needed — that the impact factor still has some predictive value, not that this disreputable business practice is unwittingly hitching its wagon to the wrong metric. (I’m sure they’d be happy to give more vouchers to articles with higher citation counts, but it takes rather long to wait for those counts to accumulate, so it may complicate the business arrangement.)<br /><br />3. Infinitely more important than any of this: the business of genetically engineering living, feeling creatures as a “product” is loathesome in its own right. If you think the “victims” of predatory Gold OA publishers are research and researchers, imagine how humane these genetic factories are for the real breathing feeling victims they design and sell, along with their sales vouchers for publishing plugs. Biomedical research, vital to the saving of lives, cannot be halted, but you can be sure that in a business like the one under discussion here, the life-saving criterion, for humans, is of no account, and the humanitarian one, for the animal victims, even less so. It’s all about cash: animal “models” for cash, and cash for whatever promotes the product. Give me predatory fool’s-gold OA publishers any time: at least there, nobody’s bleeding.Stevan Harnadhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14374474060972737847noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7961882.post-21799930021058872542015-08-15T20:10:13.378+00:002015-08-15T20:10:13.378+00:00If Cyagen Biosciences is as you say only a small c...If Cyagen Biosciences is as you say only a small company then their &#39;discount vouchers&#39; might suggest they are struggling to compete with the big companies like JaxMice and Charles Rivers etc. Please set their activities in context with what is already known about preclinical research and you may see that it is only a small piece of the somewhat scandalous nature of the industry. I wrote about it here: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6939/16/53 Susan Greenhttp://www.sabre.org.uknoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7961882.post-28017968007018788962015-08-15T14:04:57.511+00:002015-08-15T14:04:57.511+00:00I had a comment posted on Twitter saying, &quot;De...I had a comment posted on <a href="https://twitter.com/scholarlykitchn/status/632534774188482560" rel="nofollow">Twitter</a> saying, &quot;Despite what they say, this IS paid product placement and should be declared as a conflict of interest.&quot; <br /><br />I don&#39;t disagree with that. And since Cyagen envisages issuing vouchers retrospectively it suggests that an additional complication could be that some authors would find they have to go back and issue an erratum.<br /><br />In short, whatever one&#39;s views on the ethics of the scheme, this would seem to be a bird that will not fly.Richard Poynderhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05433823131339077354noreply@blogger.com